It was a top ten hit for, appropriately enough, The Police. It could now double as the anthem for the surveillance society that Britain has become.

Nobody knows exactly how many CCTV cameras are spying on virtually every aspect of public life.

Not the Home Office. Nor the police who are starting an exercise to count them all.

The most frequently quoted statistic is that there are 4.2 million. Turns out that this is only a guesstimate based on a survey of two streets in London seven years ago.

What is not a guess is there will soon be a lot more of them.

A law is quietly being pushed through Parliament giving local councils the power to insist pubs, shops and supermarkets instal the Big Brother cameras to watch us buying alcohol as a condition of their licence.

In the 90s, town centre CCTV was accepted as an essential tool of crime prevention.

Since then hundreds of millions of pounds have been invested in similar schemes both public and private.

No self-respecting shopping mall or industrial estate would be without them.

Over the past 12 years a frightening array of powers have been introduced which curtail our civil liberties in a way Orwell would never have imagined.

More are on the way. Enshrined in the Coroners and Justice Bill are clauses which allow ministers to order inquests “involving matters of national security” to be held in secret.

This will prevent embarrassment about the increasing number of our troops who are being slaughtered in Afghanistan for the lack of basic equipment to defend and protect themselves adequately against their Taliban assailants.

Relatives will be unable to know the circumstances in which their sons and daughters lost their lives.

The Home Office is soon to announce details of a programme which will monitor and store details of our every phone call and visit to an internet web site.

One man who is appalled at the paranoia that has eroded our human rights during Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s years in power is Dr Eamonn Butler.

Remember the name of this director of the Adam Smith Institute think tank. He will be all over the media soon.

He has written a revealing book which charts the onward march of what has become a totalitarian state watched over by more than a quarter of the world’s CCTV cameras.

Dr Butler has found:

* That of the 722,000 DNA samples taken by the police last year, half were from children – one of them only four months old.

* That there are now almost 1,500 litter and dog wardens with powers to levy on the spot fines.

* That taxes have risen by 51 per cent since 1997 and are falling on fewer and fewer people because of the growth of the culture of claiming benefits as a substitute for getting a job.

* That one in nine hospital patients picks up an infection during a stay in a hospital ward.

He calls his book “The Rotten State of Britain”.

And he could illustrate it with scenes of the grossly offensive protest by a bunch of Islamic fanatics who accused our troops marching through the streets of Luton last week of being butchers, baby killers, and rapists.

The police pandered to and appeased the extremists by not only allowing their demo but protecting them when the crowd predictably turned hostile.

One onlooker was so incensed that he threw some rashers of bacon at the Islamics.

He has been charged with a racially aggravated assault and is booked for a court appearance.